Security Issues with Coud

UbaidullahBokhari, Shallal and Tamandani (2016) mentioned some of the key security issues faced by cloud as data traffic hijacking, insecure interface and APIs, denial of service attacks, using cloud computing resources for attacks, shared technology vulnerabilities, unknown risk profile etc. Traffic hijacking include redirection of the SaaS, PaaS and IaaS traffic to illegal websites, spamming, phishing and so on. Best practices to reduce such threat is to prohibit the sharing of account credentials, two-factor authentication, proactive monitoring, cloud security and service level agreements (UbaidullahBokhari, Shallal & Tamandani, 2016).

Interfaces and APIs are meant to enable interaction between cloud and user but open another venue of exploitation such as improper authorization, clear-text authentication etc.

Computing resources of cloud can also be used to launch malicious botnet attacks by using infrastructure and applications to spread malware and spam (UbaidullahBokhari, Shallal & Tamandani, 2016). Another vulnerability of cloud is due to sharing of resources between multiple tenants, which can be exploited by malicious users to steal data thus requiring enforcement of strict security practices. Data breach is yet another important security threat to steal personal and financial data. Isolation failure between multiple users pose severe security threat (2016). Transportation of data between client and cloud can lead to data theft.

Key solutions to remediate the security threat involve stronger encryption, authentication and access control mechanism (Kaur & Kaur, 2015). Image Steganography is also a method employed to hide the secret information with other information (2015).

References:

Kaur, R. & Kaur, J. (2015). Cloud computing security issues and its solution: a review. 2015 2nd international conference on computing for sustainable global development.

UbaidullahBokhari, M., Shallal, Q. & Tamandani, Y. (2016). Security and privacy issues in cloud computing. 2016 international conference for sustainable global development.